Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Can an Atheist Understand the God of Abraham?

Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Francesca Stavrakopoulous, a UK academic, claims that God has a wife who was edited out of the Bible. She's an atheist so we can't expect her to understand the Bible or the God of Abraham. Even Abraham didn't understand and he spoke face to face with the Three-Person God.

Dr Stavrakopoulou says that Yahweh's wife was called Asherah and she was worshipped. There's no real news here since goddesses were worshipped and Asherah is one of many female deities. That said, goddesses were not worshipped among Abraham's Horite people. Overlooking this fact means that Stavrakopoulou has an erroneous picture of the rulers listed in Genesis.

Stavrakopoulou's claims that God had a wife and Eve was maligned are to be explored in a BBC2 series The Bible’s Buried Secrets.

Dr. Stravrakopoulou is mistaken in her assumption that the Almighty had only one wife. Among the ancient Afro-Asiatics God had two wives: Dawn and Dusk, and God traveled between his two wives in their houses daily. This is what is symbolized by the sign of TNT, which shows the sun's movement from east to west and the sacred center, or place of rest on the mountain top.

To avoid setting themselves up as God, Abraham and his ruler-priest caste placed their two wives in separate settlements on a north-south axis. So Sarah is associated with Hebron and Keturah with Beersheba, to the south. This explains the criticism of Lamech (Gen. 4) who set himself up as God when he took the life of another man. As the Hebrew scholar Theodor Gaster noted, Lamech's two wives were named Ada (Dawn) and Tzillah (Dusk). The names of Lamech's wives represent his spiritual hubris, for by setting his wives on an east-west axis he pretends equality with God.

Dr. Stravrakopoulou is apparently a literalist who assumes that the ancients must have been literalists too, yet even an atheist should be able to recognize that Dawn and Dusk are not literal wives.

Incredible that someone who writes: "Even Abraham didn't understand and he spoke face to face with the Three-Person God."This person blames an atheist not to understand: "She's an atheist so we can't expect her to understand the Bible or the God of Abraham."But feels himself so much superior to the atheist and hence also to Abraham he implies to understand God fully and hence has all the answers, what a wishful unknowingly bliss this person is in.I feel more comfortable in a world where people dare ask questions why and how and come up with some imaginative answers being right or wrong as long as they don't lead to a new dogma (and yes also science must be careful not fall in the dogma trap, but occasionally does. Hey we're all human, which makes this life pretty interesting and this world wonderful to live in.